Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Aquinas' Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy First published Fri Dec 2, 2005; substantive revision Thu Feb 23, 2017 For Thomas Aquinas, as for Aristotle, doing moral philosophy is thinking as generally as possible about what I should choose to do (and not to do), considering my whole life as a field of opportunity (or misuse of opportunity). Thinking as general as this concerns not merely my own opportunities, but the kinds of good things that any human being can do and achieve, or be deprived of. Thinking about what to do is conveniently labeled practical, and is concerned with what and how to choose and do what one intelligently and reasonably can (i) to achieve intelligible goods in one s own life and the lives of other human beings and their environment, and (ii) to be of good character and live a life that as a whole will have been a reasonable response to such opportunities. Political philosophy is, in one respect, simply that part or extension of moral philosophy which considers the kinds of choice that should be made by all who share in the responsibility and authority of choosing for a community of the comprehensive kind called political. In another respect, it is a systematic explanatory account of the forms of political arrangement that experience and empirical observation show are available, with their characteristic features, outcomes, and advantages (and disadvantages and bad aspects and consequences). Though in form descriptive and contemplative, and thus non practical, this aspect of political philosophy remains subordinate, in its systematization or conceptual structure, to the categories one finds necessary or appropriate when doing moral and political philosophy as it should be done, that is, as practical thinking by one whose every choice (even the choice to do nothing now, or the choice do moral or political philosophy) should be a good use of opportunity. Moral and political philosophy for Aquinas, then, is (1) the set or sets of concepts and propositions which, as principles and precepts of action, pick out the kinds of chosen action that are truly intelligent and reasonable for human individuals and political communities, together with (2) the arguments necessary to justify those concepts and propositions in the face of doubts, or at least to defend them against objections. It is a fundamentally practical philosophy of principles which direct us towards human fulfillment so far as that happier state of affairs is both constituted and achievable by way of the actions that both manifest and build up the excellences of character traditionally called virtues. If one must use a post Kantian jargon, it is both teleological and deontic, and not more the one than the other. 1. Interpretations and method 1.1 Is the notion of distinctive human function foundational for Aquinas? 1.2 Is the identification of man s last end foundational for Aquinas? 2. Practical reason s first principles 2.1 Precondition: capacity for self determination by free choices 2.2 Context: the open horizon of human life as a whole 2.3 At the origin of Ought 2.4 First principles of practical reason 2.5 The other basic goods 2.6 Known by (or from) inclination? 2.7 Only incipiently moral 3. Moral principles 3.1 Conscience 3.2 The supreme moral principle 3.3 Moral precepts are further specifications of this master principle and its immediate specifications 3.4 Some examples 4. Virtues 4.1 Specified by principles identifying the reasonable mean 4.2 Virtue can also be a source, rather than conclusion, of moral judgment https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 1/24

4.3 Virtue s priority not reducible to self fulfillment 4.4 The cardinal virtues 4.5 Virtue ethics 5. Political community 5.1 Common good 5.2 Political common good and political community relativized 6. The state a complete community with mixed and limited government 6.1 Four kinds of limitation on state government and law 6.2 Limited government s forms: political and regal 6.3 State authority is neither paternalistic nor divine 6.4 The state shares its authority with another complete community 7. Law 7.1 Law is an appeal to reason 7.2 Law is for a political community s common good 7.3 Law is posited by the responsible authority 7.4 Law needs to be coercive 7.5 Unjust law and just revolution Bibliography A. Works of Thomas Aquinas B. Secondary Literature Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries 1. Interpretations and method Aquinas moral and political philosophy has to be reconstructed from his theological treatises and commentaries and his commentaries on Aristotle s Nicomachean Ethics and the first two and half books of Aristotle s Politics. Its proper interpretation has been a matter of some difficulty from the time of his death in 1274. In recent decades the way to understand some aspects of its foundational concepts and logic has been strenuously disputed, not least among those philosophers who see it as offering a broadly sound answer to radical scepticism about value and obligation, an answer truer and more human than Kant s or Bentham s or their (in the broadest sense) successors. A partial sample of these controversies is given in 1.1 and 1.2 below, which state the more common interpretation on two strategic issues and then elaborate objections to those interpretations. The remainder of this article then proceeds on the basis that there is merit in these objections, and that the study of Aquinas ethics as a systematic and strictly philosophical work of practical reason (at its most general and reflective) is still in its infancy. Further textual support, from over 60 of Aquinas works, can be found in Finnis 1998. Criticisms of the interpretation of Aquinas theory that is proposed in that work can be found in Paterson 2006, Wheatley 2015, Long 2004, and earlier in Lisska 1998 and McInerny 1997. These works argue in various ways that that interpretation denies or neglects the metaphysical foundations of the principles of practical reason that it offers to identify. Support, in general, for the approach in this article will be found in Rhonheimer 2012 and 2000. The first issue underlying this debate is whether the order of inquiry and coming to know (the epistemological order) is the same as the order of metaphysical dependence. The second issue is whether we can settle the first issue by using the epistemological axiom that we come to an (ultimately metaphysical) understanding of dynamic natures by understanding capacities through their actuations which, in turn, we come to understand by understanding their objects. Does or does not that axiom entail that understanding of objects such as the intelligible goods (the objects of acts of will) precedes an adequate knowledge of nature, notwithstanding that (as is agreed on all sides) in the metaphysical order of intrinsic dependence such objects could not be willed or attained but for the given nature of (in this case) the human person? 1.1 Is the notion of distinctive human function foundational for Aquinas? One line of understanding is exemplified by the section on moral doctrine in McInerny and O Callaghan 2005. It gives a priority to Aristotle s arguments attempting to identify a distinctive or peculiarly human function, arguments which proceed on the postulate that, if each kind of craft has its own characteristic https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 2/24

function and mode of operation, so must human life as a whole have an overall and distinctively characteristic function and operatio; and the determination of this should decisively shape the whole of (the rest of) ethics and political theory. To this standard interpretation other interpreters, such as Grisez, Finnis, and Rhonheimer, object on grounds such as these: (i) Aquinas austerely self disciplined purposes as an Aristotelian commentator make quite insecure any assumption that he treats as fundamental to his own thinking any and every proposition which is treated by Aristotle as fundamental and expounded in Aquinas relevant commentary without adverse comment. (ii) The distinctive function argument is not prominent or adduced as fundamental (or at all) in Aquinas more free standing treatments of morality. (iii) The argument is treated by Aquinas commentary as yielding the conclusion that felicitas (human happiness or flourishing) consists in a complete life lived in accordance with reason and hence, by entailment, with virtue. But in the Summa Theologiae this is argued to be only an imperfect and incomplete felicitas, and the problematic character of such a concept is apparent from the Summa s definition of felicitas (and synonymously beatitudo) as perfect good and complete satisfaction of all desires. (iv) The distinctive function argument is inherently unsatisfying in ways that could hardly have failed to be apparent to so able a philosopher as Aquinas. (a) In Aquinas rendering, it depends on the postulate that nature does nothing in vain, which in turn depends, according to Aquinas, on the premise that nature is the product of divine creative rationality, a premise which Aquinas himself argues is, though provable, by no means self evident. (b) It seems arbitrary to assume that, if there is an appropriate function or operatio of human beings, it must be peculiar to them. For peculiarity or distinctiveness has no inherent relationship to practical fittingness, and in fact Aquinas elsewhere denies that rationality is peculiar to human beings since he holds that there are other intelligent creatures (the angels, understood to be created minds unmixed with matter, occupying what would otherwise be a surprising gap in the hierarchy of beings which ascends from the most material and inactive kinds through the vegetative kinds, the animal kinds, and the rational animal humankind, to the one utterly active and intelligent, non dependent and uncreated divine being). (v) The root of the weakness of the peculiar/distinctive function argument is that it is looking in the wrong direction, towards a metaphysical proposition concerning the nature of things, instead of towards what is intelligibly good as an opportunity, perhaps even the supreme opportunity, for me and anyone like me (any human being). And it is a truly fundamental methodological axiom of Aquinas s philosophy, from beginning to end of his works, that in coming to understand the nature of a dynamic reality such as human being, one must first understand its capacities, to understand which one must first understand its act(ivities), to understand which one must first come to understand those activities objects. But the objects of human activities are intelligible opportunities such as coming to know, being alive and healthy, being in friendship with others, and so forth objects whose attractiveness, fittingness, opportuneness, or appropriateness is in no way dependent upon, or even much enhanced by, the thought that they are distinctively characteristic of human beings as opposed to other animals. (vi) The fact that an operatio is distinctive of human beings does not entail that that operatio is truly valuable, still less that it is obligatory, or that it is more valuable than alternative and incompatible ways or objectives of acting. For a premise containing no evaluative or normative term cannot entail a conclusion including such a term. If, on the other hand, the postulate that a certain operatio is the proper (or even a proper) function of human beings is asserted to be itself evaluative and/or normative rather than, or as well as, factual/descriptive, then some account is needed of the postulate s source or justification (or selfevidence?). Aquinas has a fairly careful account of the self evidence of a number of foundational evaluative and normative principles, but only one or two of them are said by him to point to kinds of operatio distinctive of human beings; two of the foundational principles are explicitly said by him to direct to goods that are not peculiar to human beings. (vii) The analogy comparing one s life as a whole to arts and crafts, each with its own distinctive function, operatio, seems weak, questionable and indeed question begging. For life as a whole is open ended both in having no knowable duration (see 2.2. below) and in requiring judgment about the choice worthiness of ends as well as means and techniques (see 4.4.1. below). Moreover, Aquinas like Aristotle regularly insists on the https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 3/24

irreducibility of the distinction or distinctions between, on the one hand, ars or factio (arts, crafts, techniques) and actio (the precise subject matter of morality and morally significant choices). 1.2 Is the identification of man s last end foundational for Aquinas? Along with very many other Thomistic commentators, McInerny and O Callaghan 2005 and Celano 2003 treat Aquinas moral philosophy as founded, like his moral theology, upon his determination of what felicitas (= perfecta beatitudo and Aristotle s eudaimonia) truly is, a determination made in the opening quaestiones of the Second Part of his Summa Theologiae, where he elaborately argues that complete beatitudo or felicitas consists in an uninterruptible vision of God (and, in God, of the other truths we naturally desire to know), something possible for us only in a life in many respects another life after death. But it is possible to regard Aquinas argument in those quaestiones as dictated by the needs of a specifically theological pedagogy, as open to telling objections, and as detachable from (or at least as methodologically posterior to) the working and sound foundations of his moral philosophy and his treatment of specific moral issues detachable, that is to say, in a way that Aquinas would not need to regard as inappropriate in the different context of today s discourse. This article will treat Aquinas ethics and political theory as detachable from his theology of life s ultimate point, and will take seriously his emphatic and reiterated thesis that, apart from the divinely given and super natural opportunity of perfecta beatitudo (a gift about which philosophy as such knows nothing), the only ultimate end and beatitudo (fulfillment) for human beings is living in a completely reasonable, morally excellent (virtuosus) way. That thesis entails that philosophy s main account of morality need and should contain no claim about what perfect happiness consists in. Despite surface appearances, Aquinas is conscious of Aristotle s failure to settle whether it is contemplation or political praxis that is the essence of human fulfillment. He therefore attempts, more intently than Aristotle did in any surviving work, to identify what the first principles of ethics and politics are, and to do so without any premises or presuppositions about a unitary last end of human existence. Moreover, when Aquinas does refer to beatitudo as fundamental to identifying the principles of practical reason and the natural (because reasonable) moral law, he in the same breath emphasizes that this is not to be thought of as the happiness of the deliberating and acting individual alone, but rather as the common flourishing of the community, ultimately the whole community of humankind: The ultimate end of human life is felicitas or beatitudo So the main concern of law [including the natural (moral) law] must be with directing towards beatitudo. Again, since every part stands to the whole as incomplete stands to complete, and individual human beings are each parts of a complete community, law s appropriate concern is necessarily with directing towards common felicitas that is, to common good. (ST I II q. 90 a. 2.) The complete community mentioned here is the political community, with its laws, but the proposition implicitly refers also to the community of all rational creatures, to whose common good morality (the moral law) directs us. 1.2.1 Philosophy and theology in Aquinas theory of morality and politics Detaching Aquinas philosophy from his theology is compatible with distinctions he firmly delineates at the beginning of his two mature theological syntheses, the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae. (i) There are truths, he says, which are accessible to natural reason, that is, to ordinary experience (including the specialized observations of natural scientists), insight, and reflection; and these include practical truths about good and evil, right and wrong. (ii) Many of those truths of natural reason are confirmed, and even clarified, by divine revelation, that is, the propositions communicated directly or inferentially in the life and works of Christ, as transmitted by his immediate followers and prepared for in the Jewish scriptures accepted by those followers as revelatory. (iii) Some of the truths divinely revealed could not have been discovered by natural, philosophical reason, even though, once accepted, their content and significance can be illuminated by the philosophically ordered reflection which he calls theology. The philosophical positions in ethics and politics (including law) that are explored in this article belong to categories (i) and (ii). The moral and political norms stated, for example, in the biblical Decalogue are, in Aquinas view, all knowable independently of that revelation, which confirms and perhaps clarifies them. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 4/24

But the propositions that he holds about what the true last end or ultimate destiny of human beings actually is belong to category (iii) and cannot be affirmed on any philosophical basis, even though philosophy, he thinks, can demonstrate that they are neither incoherent nor contrary to any proposition which philosophy shows must be affirmed. 2. Practical reason s first principles Intelligence and reason are not two powers; reason and reasoning in a narrow sense can be regarded as the extension of one s intelligence (one s capacity for intelligent insight into the data of experience) into the propositional work of reasoning towards judgment, and reason (ratio) in a broader sense refers to this whole capacity, only analytically divisible into aspects or phases. So too, practical reason is not a distinct power. Rather, one s capacity to think about the way things are can be (and naturally, that is effortlessly and normally, is) extended (Aquinas metaphor) to thinking intelligently and making reasonable and true judgments about what to do. Thinking and judging of the latter kind is practical, that is, intends to terminate in choice and action (in Greek praxis, in Latin actio). Practical reason sometimes refers (i) directly to such thinking, sometimes (ii) to the propositional content or structure which such thinking has when it is done well and thus to the propositions that pick out what kinds of action one ought to be judging pursuit worthy, undesirable, right, wrong, etc. and sometimes (iii) to the capacity to engage in such thinking by understanding such propositions and being guided by them. 2.1 Precondition: capacity for self determination by free choices Practical reason s central activity is deliberation about what to do. One would have no need to deliberate unless one were confronted by alternative attractive possibilities for action (kinds of opportunity) between which one must choose (in the sense that one cannot do both at the same time, if at all) and can choose. The standards that one comes to understand to be the appropriate guides for one s deliberation, choice and action give such guidance, not by predicting what one will do, but by directing what one should do. (The should here may but need not be moral.) There could be no normativity, no practical (choice guiding) directiveness, unless free choices were really possible. Aquinas s position is not that all our activities are freely chosen: there are indeed acts of the human person, perhaps quite frequent, which are not human acts in the central sense (freely chosen) but rather spontaneous and undeliberated. Nor is it that chosen acts must be immediately preceded by choice: many of one s acts are the carrying out of choices which were made in the past and need not be now renewed or repeated since no alternative option appears attractive. It is that one can be and often is in such a position that, confronted by two or more attractive possibilities (including perhaps the option of doing nothing ), there is nothing either within or outside one s personal constitution that determines (settles) one s choice, other than the choosing: Mal. q. 6. This conception of free choice (liberum arbitrium or libera electio) is much stronger than Aristotle s, on whose conception free choices are free only from external determining factors. Aquinas conception of free choice is also incompatible with modern notions of soft determinism, or the supposed compatibility of human responsibility (and of the sense [self understanding] that one is freely choosing) with determination of every event by laws (e.g. physical) of nature. Aquinas understands the freedom of our free choices to be a reality as primary and metaphysically and conceptually irreducible as the reality of physical laws, and he puts all his reflections on morality and practical reason under the heading of mastery over one s own acts (ST I II, prologue). He is also insistent that if there were no such freedom and self determination, there could be no responsibility (fault, merit, etc.), and no sense or content to any ought (normativity) such as ethics is concerned with. 2.1.1 Choice, intention and act descriptions Aquinas pulls together into a powerful (though confusingly expounded) synthesis a long tradition of analysis of the elements of understanding (reason) and intelligent response (will) that constitute deliberation, choice, and execution of choice: ST I II qq. 6 17. The analysis shows the centrality of intention in the assessment of options and actions. In a narrow sense of the word, intention is always of ends and choice is of means; but https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 5/24

since every means (save the means most proximate to sheer trying or exertion) is also an end relative to a more proximate means, what is chosen when one adopts one of two or more proposals (for one s action) that one has shaped in one s deliberation is rightly, though more broadly, said to be what one intends, what one does intentionally or with intent(ion), and so forth. An act(ion) is paradigmatically what it is intended to be; that is, its morally primary description prior to any moral evaluation or predicate is the description it had in the deliberation by which one shaped the proposal to act thus. Aquinas way of saying this is: acts are specified by have their specific character from their objects, where objects has the focal meaning of proximate end as envisaged by the deliberating and acting person. Of course, the behavior involved in that act can be given other descriptions in the light of conventions of description, or expectations and responsibilities, and so forth, and one or other these descriptions may be given priority by law, custom, or some other special interest or perspective. But it is primarily on acts qua intended, or on the acts (e.g. of taking care) that one ought to have intended, that ethical standards (moral principles and precepts) bear. To repeat: in the preceding sentence intended is used in the broad sense; Aquinas sometimes employs it this way (e.g. ST II II q. 64 a. 7), though in his official synthesis the word is used in the narrower sense to signify the (further) intention with which the act s object was chosen object being the most proximate of one s (broad sense) intentions. This understanding of human action has often been misappropriated by interpreters who have assumed that when Aquinas says that acts are wrongful by reason of their undue matter (indebita materia), he refers to an item of behavior specifiable by its physical characteristics and causal structure. So, for example, direct killing of the innocent is taken to refer to behavior whose causally immediate effect is killing, or which has its lethal effect before it has its intended good effect. But this is incompatible with Aquinas fundamental and consistent positions about human action. The matter of a morally significant act is, for him, its immediate object under the description it has in one s deliberation: Mal. q. 7 a. 1; q. 2 a. 4 ad 5; a. 6; a. 7 ad 8. It is, in other words, not an item of behavior considered in its observable physicality as such, but rather one s behavior as one s objective (or the most proximate of one s objectives), that is, as one envisages it, adopts it by choice, and causes it by one s effort to do so. The most objective account of human action is provided by the account that is most subjective. This sound account will, however, set aside any distorted act descriptions that one may offer others, or even oneself, as rationalizations and exculpations of one s choice and act, but that do not correspond to what really made the option attractive, as end or as means, and so was treated, in one s actual course of deliberation, as one s reason for acting as one did. The immediately and foreseen lethal effect of an act of self defense may genuinely be a side effect of one s choosing to stop the attack by the only available efficacious means (ST II II q. 64 a. 7), or it may be one s precise object (and the matter of one s choice and act) because one s (further) intent was to take lethal revenge on an old enemy, or to deter potential assailants by the prospect of their death, or to win a reward. Behaviorally identical items of behavior may thus be very different human acts, discernible only by knowing the acting person s reasons for acting. 2.2 Context: the open horizon of human life as a whole Ethical standards, for which practical reason s first principles provide the foundations or sources, concern actions as choosable and self determining. They are thus to be distinguished clearly, as Aristotle already emphasized, from standards which are practical, rational, and normative in a different way, namely the technical or technological standards internal to every art, craft, or other system for mastering matter. Aquinas locates the significant and irreducible difference between ethics and all these forms of art in three features: (i) Moral thought, even when most unselfishly concerned with helping others through the good effects of physical effort and causality, is fundamentally concerned with the problem of bringing order into one s own will, action, and character, rather than the problem of how to bring order into the world beyond one s will. (ii) Correspondingly, the effects of morally significant free choices (good or evil) are in the first instance intransitive (effects on the will and character of the acting person. Only secondarily are they transitive effects on the world, even when that person s intentions are focused, as they normally should be, on the benefits of those external effects. (iii) Whereas every art and technique has a more or less limited objective (end) which can be accomplished by skillful deployment of the art, moral thought has in view an unlimited and common (shared) horizon or point, that of human life as a whole [finis communis totius humanae vitae] (ST I II q. 21 a. 2 ad 2), for each of one s morally significant choices (for good or evil) is a choice to devote a part of one s single life to a purpose which could have been any of the whole open ended range of purposes open to human pursuit for the sake of benefiting all or any human being(s). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 6/24

2.3 At the origin of Ought Practical reason, in Aquinas view, has both one absolutely first principle and many truly first principles: ST I II q. 94 a. 2. The absolutely first principle is formal and in a sense contentless. Like the logical principle of non contradiction which controls all rational thought, it expresses, one might say, the pressure of reason and is so far from being empty of significance and force that its form may be regarded as the frame, and its normativity the source, for all the normativity of the substantive first principles and of the moral principles which are inferable from them. Aquinas articulates it as Good is to be done and pursued, and bad avoided (ibid.). This has often been truncated to (i) Good is to be done, and evil avoided or even, more drastically, (iia) Do good and avoid evil or yet more drastically (iib) Avoid evil and seek the good. But Grisez 1963 gave reason to think these abbreviations both exegetically and philosophically unsound. The first practical principle is not a command or imperative as (ii) would have it, nor is it a moral principle as all these formulae suggest by omitting to be pursued (see 2.7 below). Both in grammar and in propositional content, the principle s gerundive is to be is neither imperative nor predictive, but rationally directive an ought in the way that gets its fully developed and central sense and normativity in the more specified ought of moral standards. Against a Kantian or neo Kantian primacy or ultimacy of structures of mind, Aquinas would say that just as the pressure of reason articulated in the principle of non contradiction has its source in the structure of reality in the real opposition between being and not being so the source of the equivalently first practical principle is the real desirability of intelligible goods, and the true undesirability of what is not good. 2.4 First principles of practical reason If Plato and Aristotle fail to articulate substantive first principles of practical reason, and if Kant overlooks them in favor of the quasi Humeian notions of motivation that dominate ethics during the Enlightenment (and ever since), the articulation of such principles by Aquinas deserves attention. 2.4.1 First principles are insights into the data of experience and understood possibility Each of the several substantive first principles of practical reason picks out and directs one towards a distinct intelligible good which, in line with the primariness of the principle identifying it, can be called basic (not a term used by Aquinas). Aquinas regards each of the first practical principles as self evident (per se notum: known through itself) and undeduced (primum and indemonstrabile). He does not, however, mean that they are data less intuitions ; even the indemonstrable first principles in any field of human knowledge are knowable only by insight (intellectus) into data of experience (here, of causality and inclination). Moreover, when describing the first practical principles as self evident, Aquinas emphasises that selfevidence is relative: what is not obvious to some will be self evident to those who have more ample experience and a better understanding of other aspects of the matter. And we should expect our understanding of first principles to grow as we come to understand more about the objects to which they refer and direct (e.g. knowledge, human life, marriage, etc.). 2.4.2 Their Oughts are not inferred from any Is Aquinas s repeated affirmation that practical reason s first principles are undeduced refutes the common accusation or assumption that his ethics invalidly attempts to deduce or infer ought from is, for his affirmation entails that the sources of all relevant oughts cannot be deduced from any is. There remain, however, a number of contemporary Thomists who deny that such a deduction or inference need be fallacious, and regard Aquinas as postulating some such deduction or inference. They are challenged., however, by others (such as Rhonheimer, Boyle, and Finnis) who, while sharing the view that his ethics is in these respects fundamentally sound, deny that Aquinas attempted or postulated any such deduction or inference, and ask for some demonstration (i) that he did and (ii) that he or anyone else could make such a deduction or inference. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 7/24

These critics reinforce their denial by pointing out that in his prologue to his commentary on Aristotle s Ethics, Aquinas teaches that knowledge of things that are what they are independently of our thought (i.e. of nature) is fundamentally distinct both from logic and from practical knowledge, one of whose two species is philosophia moralis (whose first principles or fundamental oughts are under discussion here) 2.4.3 A sample first principle: Knowledge is pursuit worthy Aquinas neglects to spell out how these first principles come to be understood. But he holds that they are understood and accepted by everyone who has enough experience to understand their terms. The process of coming to understand a first practical principle may be exemplified as follows, in relation to the basic good of knowledge. As a child one experiences the inclination to ask questions, and to greet apparently satisfactory answers with satisfaction and failure to answer as a disappointment. At some point one comes to understand has the insight that such answers are instances of a quite general standing possibility, namely knowledge, coming to know and overcoming ignorance. By a distinct though often well nigh simultaneous further insight one comes to understand that this knowledge is not merely a possibility but also a good [bonum], that is to say an opportunity, a benefit, something desirable as a kind of improvement (a perfectio) of one s or anyone s condition, and as to be pursued. 2.5 The other basic goods The basic human goods which first practical principles identify and direct us to are identified by Aquinas as (i) life, (ii) marriage between man and woman and bringing up of children [coniunctio maris et feminae et educatio liberorum] (not at all reducible to procreation ), (iii) knowledge, (iv) living in fellowship (societas and amicitia) with others, (v) practical reasonableness (bonum rationis) itself, and (vi) knowing and relating appropriately to the transcendent cause of all being, value, normativity and efficacious action (ST I II q. 94 aa. 2 & 3). His lists are always explicitly open ended. They sketch the outlines and elements of the flourishing of the human persons in whom they can be actualized. Even complete fulfillment the beatitudo perfecta that Aquinas places firmly outside our natural capacities and this mortal life could not be regarded as a further good, but rather as a synthesis and heightened actualization of these basic goods in the manner appropriate to a form of life free from both immaturity (and other incidents of procreation) and decay. Similarly, as is entailed by the epistemological principle that nature is known by capacities, capacities by acts, and acts by their objects (see 1.1(v) above), these basic goods, being the basic objects of will and free action, are the outline of human nature. The is of an adequate account of human nature is dependent upon prior grasp of the oughts of practical reason s first, good identifying principles, even though that prior grasp was made possible by that partial understanding of human nature which comes with an understanding of certain lines of causality and possibility. But defending the epistemological priority of the intelligible objects of will in explanations of practical reason does not entail (contrast McInerny 1992) any denial of the metaphysical priority of the naturally given facts about the human makeup. 2.6 Known by (or from) inclination? Many modern accounts of Aquinas theory of natural law give explanatory primacy to the naturalness of the inclinations (to live, to know, etc.) that correspond to these basic goods. But others regard this as a fundamental misunderstanding of Aquinas conception of will, and of the epistemological relationship between nature and reason. Will is for him intelligent response to intelligible good: one s will is in one s reason [voluntas in ratione]. He makes it very explicit both that human actions are rightly said to be natural (in the morally relevant sense of natural ) when and because they are intelligent and reasonable (ST I II q. 71 a. 2), and that there are inclinations which are natural, in the sense that they are commonly found or characterize some or even most individuals, yet are unnatural because lacking any intelligibly good object. So explanatory priority must be accorded to the basic human goods themselves, and to the self evident desirability which makes each of them the object of an inclination in the will of anyone sufficiently intelligent and mature to understand their goodness (that is, the way they make human beings more fulfilled, more perfect [complete]). An inclination of that kind is relevant in practical reason because its object is desirable, and desirable because it would contribute to anyone s flourishing. To say this is not to say that our natural inclinations to what contributes to our flourishing are mere accident or happenstance. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 8/24

2.7 Only incipiently moral Many nineteenth and early twentieth century accounts of Aquinas took it that the first principles of practical reason, which he regularly calls first principles of natural law or natural right, are moral principles picking out kinds of human act as to be done (e.g. alms giving to the poor) or not done (e.g. murder, adultery), in the manner of the Commandments. But though there are a few passages in which Aquinas himself speaks in that way, they can be read down so as to make them consistent with the more strategic passages in which he speaks of such moral principles or norms as derived conclusions from first principles. (See also 3.3 below.) Even immoral people so blinded by culture or disposition that they do not make these inferences nevertheless can and normally do understand the first principles of practical reason and are guided by them, though imperfectly, in their deliberations. Against Kant s assumption that, since the ends toward which one wishes to act are subjective because projected, and established in one s deliberating and willingness (as Hume proposed), by one s subrational desires, practical reason s function is to limit and channel one s pursuit of those ends, Aquinas considers that practical reason s first and fundamental operation is not limiting, confining or negative but rather facilitating and positive: finding and constructing intelligible ends to be pursued (prosequenda), ends that give intelligent point to our behavior. The thesis that the first practical principles are only incipiently moral should not be confused with the widespread modern opinion that practical reason s default position is self interest or prudential reason, so that there is a puzzle about how one transits from this to morality. In Aquinas classical view, one s reason (as distinct from some of one s customary ways of thinking) naturally understands the primary or basic goods as good for anyone, and further understands that it is good to participate in the many forms of friendship which require that one set aside all merely emotionally motivated self preference. 3. Moral principles The discerning, inferring and elaborating of moral principles is a task for practical reasonableness. The judgments one makes in doing this are together called one s conscience, in a sense prior to the sense in which conscience is the judgments one passes or could pass on one s own acts considered retrospectively. Someone whose conscience is sound has in place the basic elements of sound judgment and practical reasonableness, that is of the intellectual and moral virtue which Aquinas calls prudentia. Full prudentia requires that one put one s sound judgment into effect all the way down, i.e. into the particulars of choice and action in the face of temptations to unreasonable but perhaps not unintelligent alternatives. 3.1 Conscience Conscience in Aquinas view is not a special power or presence within us, but is our practical intelligence at work, primarily in the form of a stock of judgments about the reasonableness (rightness) or unreasonableness (wrongness) of kinds of action (kinds of option). Since each such judgment is of the form [It is true that] action of the kind phi is always [or generally] wrong [or: is generally to be done, etc.] or phi is [always] [or: generally] required [or forbidden] by reason, it must be the case as Aquinas stresses very forcefully that one s conscience is binding upon oneself even when it is utterly mistaken and directs or licenses awful misdeeds. For since it is logically impossible that one could be aware that one s present judgment of conscience is mistaken, setting oneself against one s own firm judgment of conscience is setting oneself against the goods of truth and reasonableness, and that cannot fail to be wrong: ST I II q. 19 a. 5; Ver. q. 17 a. 4. The fact that, if one has formed one s judgment corruptly, one will also be acting wrongly if one follows it (ST I II q. 19 a. 6) does not affect the obligatoriness (for oneself) of one s conscience. This teaching about conscience was rather novel in his day and to this day is often misrepresented or misapplied as a kind of relativism or subjectivism. But it is actually an implication of Aquinas clarity about the implications of regarding moral judgments as true (or false) and of thus rejecting subjectivism and relativism. 3.2 The supreme moral principle https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 9/24

Aquinas is regrettably inexplicit about how the first practical principles yield moral principles, precepts or rules that have the combined generality and specificity of the precepts found in the portion of the biblical Decalogue (Exod. 20.1 17; Deut. 5.6 21) traditionally called moral (the last seven precepts, e.g. parents should be reverenced, murder is wrong, adultery is wrong, etc.). But a reconstruction of his scattered statements makes it clear enough that in his view a first implication of the array of first principles, each directing us to goods actualisable as much in others as in oneself, is this: that one should love one s neighbor as oneself. Since he considers this principle, like the set of first principles mentioned in I II q. 94 a. 2, to be self evident (per se notum), he must regard the principle of love of neighbor as self not so much as an inference from, or even specification of, but rather a redescriptive summary of that set. This in turn suggests the further reflection that the first principles, and the goods (bona) to which they direct us, are transparent, so to speak, for the flesh and blood persons in whom they are and can be instantiated. Moreover, it may be thought that the primary moral principle of love of neighbor as oneself is another reason to doubt (despite appearances) the strategic role of eudemonism in his ethics. Aristotelianising interpretations of Aquinas ethics normally make central the notion of fulfillment, understood (it seems) as the fulfillment of the deliberating and acting person to which the requirement of neighbor love does not have a perspicuous relationship. Grisez and others, on the other hand, take it that the role of fulfillment (eudaimonia, beatitudo) in ethical thought s unfolding from the first principles of practical reason is best captured by a master moral principle close though perhaps not identical to Aquinas s supreme moral principle: that all one s acts of will be open to integral human fulfillment, that is to the fulfillment of all human persons and communities now and in future. The supreme moral principle of love of neighbor as self has, Aquinas thinks, an immediately proximate specification in the Golden Rule: Others are to be treated by me as I would wish them to treat me. The tight relation between the love principle and the Golden Rule suggests that love and justice, though analytically distinguishable, certainly cannot be contrasted as other and other. Neighbor excludes no human being anywhere, insofar as anyone could be benefited by one s choices and actions. To love someone is essentially to will that person s good. The reasonable priorities among all these persons as objects of one s love, goodwill and care are discussed by Aquinas both as an order of love(s) [ordo amoris] and as a matter of right and justice. 3.2.1 The fuller version: the place of the transcendent Since Aquinas thinks that the existence and providence of God, as the transcendent source of all persons and benefits, is certain, his usual statement of the master moral principle affirms that one should love God and one s neighbor as oneself. But since he accepts that the existence of God is not self evident, he can allow that the more strictly self evident form of the master moral principle refers only to love of human persons (self and neighbors). He would add that, once the existence and nature of God is accepted, as it philosophically should be, the rational requirement of loving God, and thus the fuller version of the master moral principle, is self evident. He also holds that one does not offend against this requirement of loving God except by making choices contrary to human good, that is, to love of self or neighbor: ScG III c. 122 n. 2. 3.3 Moral precepts are further specifications of this master principle and its immediate specifications All moral principles and norms, Aquinas thinks, can be inferred as either implicit in, or referable to as conclusions from the moral first principle of love of neighbor as self: ST I II q. 99 a. 1 ad 2 with q. 91 a. 4c and q. 100 a. 2 ad 2; q. 100 aa. 3 and 11c. But he never displays an example or schema of these deductionlike inferences. Consequently, as noted in 2.7 above, his would be successors have sometimes proposed that moral principles and norms have the self evidence of first principles, and sometimes, equally desperately, have offered premises which, though suggested by some of Aquinas s argumentation or remarks, are incoherent with his general theory e.g. that natural functions are not to be frustrated. The main lines of Aquinas theory of moral principles strongly suggest that moral norms (precepts, standards) are specifications of Good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided, specifications which so direct choice and action that each of the primary goods (elements of human fulfillment) will be respected and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 10/24

promoted to the extent required by the good of practical reasonableness (bonum rationis). And what practical reasonableness requires seems to be that each of the basic human goods be treated as what it truly is: a basic reason for action amongst other basic reasons whose integral directiveness is not to be cut down or deflected by subrational passions. The principle of love of neighbor as self and the Golden Rule immediately pick out one element in that integral directiveness. The other framework moral rules give moral direction by stating ways in which more or less specific types of choice are immediately or mediately contrary to some basic good. This appears to be Aquinas s implicit method, as illustrated below (3.4). An adequate exposition and defence of the moral norms upheld by Aquinas requires a critique, only hints for which can be found in his work, of theories which claim that choice can and should rationally be guided by a utilitarian, consequentialist or proportionalist master principle calling for maximizing of overall net good (or, some say, incompatibly, for minimizing net evils). In developments of Aquinas s moral theory such as are proposed by Grisez and Finnis, that critique is treated as an indispensable preliminary to any reflective nonquestion begging identification of the route from first principles to specific moral norms. 3.4 Some examples The three examples or sets of examples considered in this section are only examples of the kinds of moral norms (praecepta) which Aquinas considers are excluded by any sound conscience from one s deliberations about what to choose. Other examples are more complex, such as theft and various other wrongful deprivations of property, and the form of charging for loans which is named usury and judged by Aquinas (not implausibly, though with little direct applicability to developed financial markets: see Finnis 1998, 204 210) to be always contrary to just equality. Aquinas also treats in some detail scores, indeed hundreds of other moral issues, touching the life of judges, advocates, merchants, the rich, the poor, or everyone. 3.4.1 Homicide Some types of act are intrinsically and immediately contrary to the basic human good of life, that is to a human being s very being. Every act which is intended, whether as end or as means, to kill an innocent human being, and every act done by a private person which is intended to kill any human being, is to be excluded from deliberation as wrongful because contrary to love of neighbor as self (or self as neighbor). Public persons, Aquinas thinks, can rightfully intend to kill in carrying out needful acts of war, suppression of serious wrongdoing, and punishment (see also 6.3 below). As a private person one may rightfully use force in defense of oneself or others even if the force is such that one foresees it is likely or even certain to kill; but one s intention in using such lethal force must not be to kill, but only to disable and block the attack (and less lethal force would not have met the need for defensive blocking of the assault). Aquinas discussion of this (ST II II q. 64 a.7) is the locus classicus for what later became known, unhappily, as the principle of double effect, whose real core is the thought that moral principles bear differently on kinds of action specified by intention (e.g. to kill) from the way they bear on behavior chosen with foresight that it will (probably or even certainly) kill as a side effect (praeter intentionem outside the acting person s intention). Aquinas wavers between suggesting that the use of lethal public force, e.g. in capital punishment, intends ( is referred to ) justice rather than killing, and plainly accepting that in such cases death is indeed intended. The latter is his dominant position; his arguments to justify a kind of choice which, whatever its beneficial consequences, is so immediately against the good of life have come increasingly to seem insufficient: the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1993), paras. 2263 67 expounds its whole teaching on war, lethal police action, and capital punishment on the basis of the thought that these can be justified only so far as they amount to causing death as a side effect, and not as killing with intent to kill. The thought is formulated by appeal to Aquinas reference to acts with double effect in his discussion of private defence in ST II II q. 64 a. 7. 3.4.2 Adultery and other kinds of act contrary to the good of marriage Marriage is, Aquinas says, a primary human good and, philosophically considered, it has a dual point (end, finis): (i) the procreation and bringing up of children is a manner suited to their good, and (ii) fides, which https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas moral political/ 11/24